According to journalist Jerome Starkey, writing for The Times UK, at first no one claimed responsibility for the killings. A US official in Kabul refused to identify the force involved, citing “utmost national and strategic security interests”.

A subsequent Times investigation revealed that the gunmen were U.S. military and Afghan police conducting a raid directed at suspected Taliban insurgents. More than a dozen survivors, officials, police chiefs and a religious leader interviewed at and around the scene of the attack maintain that the perpetrators were U.S. and Afghan gunmen.